


Touch

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Tattoos, Touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 03:49:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5693458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherever he touches her, she feels everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touch

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: S7  
> A/N: Written for the XF Writing Challenge on tumblr.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

She has spent so many hours poring over textbooks, learning which nerve inserts into which muscle and where, and none of it means a damn thing when Mulder smooths his hand down her back. He has soft hands, office hands, a callus from writing still on the skin over the distal phalanx of his second finger, but the whorls and loops on his fingertips catch at her skin all the same, dragging her nerves along with them. Wherever he touches her, she feels everything, a tangle of nerves singing underneath her skin, all sensation concentrated in the points where his skin touches hers. Five fingerprints on her skin, and laughter in his eyes. How long did she spend resisting this, insulating herself from the languid torpor his touch evokes with layers of silk and wool and cotton? How long did she manage to hold out? 

She remembers the fire cupped in his palm as he tugged at her shirt in Alaska. She remembers the way the only heat her body could hold after her father's death was in the cheek his hand cradled. 

He circles her tattoo, just barely brushing it with one finger, around and around and around until her skin sizzles. She remembers the night she got it: the damp chill of the snowy air, the prickle of pain dazzling her senses, the smolder of her anger at him. She was there with someone else, with Ed, who wanted to hold her hand, but her thoughts were on Mulder, the way when they looked at each other she felt the jolt of tinfoil between her teeth. The needle shot sparks up her spine, but at least it was a release.

Now when Mulder touches her tattoo, a new kind of tension gathers, coiling in her spine. The blunt edge of his fingernail skates across her skin. She shivers. She would swear she could identify the patterns of his fingerprints just from the splay of his hands across her skin. But they are naked together for almost the first time and all he does is circle and circle her tattoo. She lies on her stomach with her arms folded under her chin, gazing down the length of him. She could name every muscle in his chest and belly, explain the way his torso knits into the span of his hips and the length of his legs, but he touches her lower back and her left earlobe itches, defying all reason, defying all she knows of anatomy. But that's Mulder: he shifts the world, bends the rules until every familiar thing seems strange, and she seeks solace in the logic of the fantastical. The itch in her earlobe creeps up her neck to her scalp, prickling across her skull like pins and needles as he just keeps tracing the inked arc of the ouroboros that pulls itself taut above her thoracolumbar fascia. She struggles not to move as her nerves fire in unpredictable and unexpected ways. 

His duvet is heaped up around her body. Mulder, having given in at some point to the necessity of a bedroom, has luxurious taste in furnishings. She relishes the silky expensive feel of the cotton under her cheek, trying to distract herself from the way her his touch tugs at her. She can feel the slightly raised weal where her skin has scarred in the inked trail of the needle, the only time she chose to wear the memory of a wound. She would not choose otherwise, despite the madness that came after, the fever-heat, the endorphins, the touch of other hands. She refuses regret, roots the ache of what might have been out of her bones, and replaces it with the rightness of this moment.

"Scully," he says, and his voice rasps down her spine and fills some undiscovered hollow at the center of her. Maybe it didn't exist until his words grew husky enough to wear down some last veneer of indifference. She feels the slippery warmth between her legs, an automatic response to the baritone shiver of lust he has put into the syllables of her name. 

"Mulder," she prompts when he doesn't say anything more, and it's an effort to keep her voice steady. She is pleased to hear the usual detachment in her voice, as if they are debating which exit will get them to their destination most efficiently. The greatest part of her attention is pooled in her lower back, swirling with the motion of his fingertip, now his knuckle, a new, blunter, rounder pressure. 

"Did it hurt?" he asks.

She thinks of the quiver of the needle darting in and out of her skin. She thinks of sitting hunched over on the shaky stool, her arms wrapped around her belly, caught between the pressure of her own bones and the hot flicker of the needle. She thinks of the way her teeth buzzed. She thinks of the tickling seep of blood and ink, blotted away by gauze. She thinks of the familiar rubbery tension of latex against her skin, the tattoo artist's gloved fingers mapping the route that Mulder's fingers won't abandon. She thinks of Ed's eyes glancing over her, like a stray hair across her face that she couldn't blow away. She thinks of the cool slip of air across her skin, her shirt pulled tight around the bottom of her ribs. She remembers the euphoric lift, some combination of her body's own chemicals and her brain's uncanny response to consensual pain. The bruise around her eye hadn't felt like that, but it had faded after a few days. The tattoo - her choice, her symbol - has endured, and the steel-stern resolve with it. 

"No," she says. "It didn't hurt."

"And now?" he asks. 

She rolls over, his fingers trailing across her back and over her hip. She catches his wrist and pulls him closer. He moves easily, years of leverage having built a pivot point between them. She welcomes the weight of him pressing her down into the loft of his bedding. When he breathes, their ribs notch together. 

"No," she says. "It doesn't hurt at all."

His mouth is taut against hers, an endlessly renewing circle that speaks of hope and tastes of copper. On her back, the ouroboros glows with the stored energy of his touch. They go in circles, come around again and again to each other, to the center of things, to the way his fingers lace through hers and his arms pull tight around her.


End file.
